


Green Eyed Monster

by Copperonthetongue



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire & Related Fandoms, A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Cersei and Arya, F/M, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Jealousy, Motherhood, POV Cersei, Past Cersei Lannister/Jaime Lannister, Pregnancy, Prophecy, Queen Cersei Lannister, Unexpected Connections, cersei REALLY hates Brienne, cersei is cray, envy - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-25
Updated: 2018-12-25
Packaged: 2019-09-26 21:48:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,009
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17149685
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Copperonthetongue/pseuds/Copperonthetongue
Summary: Months have passed since her time with the Sparrows but Cersei still can't sleep.





	Green Eyed Monster

**Author's Note:**

> I was in my feelings about my first Christmas without my own family so I decided to explore Cersei and how she feels about the state of affairs post season 7.

Cersei cannot sleep, although she’s spent what feels like a small eternity trying. It’s closer to dawn now than it is dusk, and no matter that the hour grows later with each breath she takes, sleep simply will not come and there’s not a gods-cursed thing she can do about it. 

 

Queen of the Seven Kingdoms she may be, but not even she can command her body’s obedience at the moment.

Cersei’s bed is warm. Her eiderdown mattress is as soft as a cloud and her blankets are the finest, thickest furs in all the Seven Kingdoms. She knows that she is as safe as can be managed, but peace eludes her for the third night in a row, regardless. It is a situation that is quickly becoming untenable, and though the thought galls her, Cersei is near ready to summon Qyburn to dose her with milk of the poppy despite the babe in her belly if only it would let her sleep.

Cersei gives in and opens her eyes, peering into the gloom of her bedchamber, and after a long, heart-pounding moment of allowing them to adjust to the dark, she can see the Mountain, weak moonlight glinting on his armor, the pale white of his cloak ghostly and unsettling in the shadows. He stands mutely in a corner, unmoving and ever-watchful, and Cersei doesn’t need to see his face to know that his bloodshot, empty eyes are fixed on her chamber door. 

 

The new ( and in Cersei’s opinion), much improved, Gregor Clegane is the perfect bodyguard, never eating, never sleeping, his focus never wavering, his only thoughts are the ones she permits him to have and the only orders he takes come from her…and there is a measure of comfort in that knowledge for Cersei, but although her mind knows that she is safe, the rest of her seems disinclined to accept it.

It’s ridiculous, but here in the privacy of her chamber, Cersei can admit ( to herself at least), that she’s still afraid, it’s been months since...

Cersei shoves the memories down with vicious efficiency - an efficiency unfortunately born of both necessity and practice - but no matter how far down she pushes, she knows that they’re still there, just waiting for a chance to rise up and drown her. In the darkest part of her heart, where she’s locked up all the things that frighten her, Cersei wonders if she will ever not be afraid again.

 

Even now, months later, when what was done to her should be but a dim memory...Cersei closes her eyes and she can still smell the fetid scent of her own waste, taste the brackish filth of the water she’d sucked up so desperately from the floor of her cell and without fail she sees Septa Unella’s smug, plain face in her nightmares every single night.

Cersei knows that her father would roll over in his grave if he could see her now, nursing such a foolish and futile fear. Tywin Lannister had hated weakness with every fiber of his being and he’d passed that loathing on to his children. Just imagining that cold expression of long-suffering disappointment on his face, even now, when the man was months cold in his grave and Cersei herself long since a woman grown and a queen to boot, still has the power to make her stomach churn with anxiety.

Logically, Cersei knows that no one could breach her chamber now - not with a resurrected Gregor Clegane guarding her - and she holds that knowledge close as a lover to keep her terror at bay. She is safe because if the Mountain had been mighty before his death, he was a dozen times more formidable afterward, and Cersei takes a cruel pleasure in knowing that he is hers, blood and bone, an extension of herself. Clegane is the flesh, but it is Cersei who is the will. What need has Cersei now of a blade of her own, when the Mountain and all his strength and skill is hers to command? 

Cersei’s hungry eyes follow the decorative whorls of his Kingsguard breastplate in the dark, the shadows of her chamber making the designs stand out in unusually stark relief. The new and much improved Gregor Clegane is the perfect Sworn Sword, better even than her beautiful brother had been in his prime. She could ask for nothing more...

….but Cersei still wishes she had her own fucking sword and the skill to use it. 

Even now, her longing galls her almost beyond bearing because all Cersei has ever truly wanted is to be able to fight her own battles, to wage her own wars, and command her own destiny, but to her eternal regret, an accident of birth robbed her of that opportunity. 

 

Cersei may have been born first, but she’d been born a woman, and worse, a Lannister. The bitterest moment of her life had been the day their father had handed Jaime the sword Cersei had craved with every part of herself and poured jewels and silks and perfumes into her own small hands in its place. 

They had been a poor consolation for the death of her dreams. 

Cersei gives in at last and allows herself the luxury of drifting back to her childhood, remembering the long days when Jaime trained and Cersei had spied on him from the high balcony in bitter envy while she practiced her own needlework. She’d loved Jaime with all her heart, but in the deepest, most secret part of herself, where not even Jaime was permitted to go, she’d hated him a little then, simply for being able to do what she could not, and even worse, for being so gods-cursed good at it. 

Cersei had known even then that she could have been her brothers equal if only their father would allow her to try, but he hadn’t. Not even when Cersei had swallowed her pride enough to beg him. Cersei had never before in her life begged anybody for anything, but that day she’d begged her father to just let her try to practice with Jaime. Just once, and if she could not keep up with him she would never ask again. 

It has been more than twenty years since that night, but Cersei still remembers the exact way the firelight had thrown Tywin’s sharp features into shadow, and the precise curve of the sneer on his face as he scoffed at the very idea of it. Cersei’s will never forget the cruel words that had sent her fleeing back to her septa and her needlework with the echo of his laughter following behind her, her throat burning and eyes stinging with tears she'd refused to allow herself to shed.

Cersei had never again begged Tywin Lannister for anything. Not until the day he commanded her to marry Loras Tyrell and she shouldn’t have bothered then either, because he’d said no then too…just as he had all those years before. She’d sacrificed her dignity again, all for nothing.

At least he hadn’t laughed her out of the room that time, Cersei takes a spiteful joy in knowing that she had robbed him of that much at least. 

 

Envy was never a thing that came easily to Cersei, which had made the times she’d felt it all the more memorable. There had only ever been a handful, but each of them had marked her ever afterward. Jaime and his sword, little Arya Stark and the smile on her face as she practiced with her ‘Dancing Master’. 

Cersei feels faint smile spread on her own face in the dark, now, because shrouded by the glow of nostalgia even the memory of Arya Stark can be charming, it seems. Though admittedly, Cersei holds no particular animosity towards the youngest Stark daughter, of all the Starks, Arya had always vexed Cersei the least. 

Sansa had been a thorn in Cersei’s side from the moment she’d met the girl, needy and so pathetically trusting that it had almost been nauseating. Her beauty and her grace had been salt in an open wound to Cersei, and the whispers of Maggie the Frog had fanned Cersei’s dislike into loathing.

Arya was nothing like Sansa had been, the child had been entirely absorbed with her own desires and none of them had been the crown that sat atop Cersei’s head or the hand of either of her sons. There had been no craving whatsoever for power in the youngest Stark girl, and that had made Cersei warm to her a trifle…even after the incident with the wolves.

Arya Stark would never have desired anything of Cersei’s, and even if she had she’d been far too plain to ever be the rival the seer warned Cersei of all those years ago. 

So Cersei had allowed the girl her small pleasures, had, in fact, nurtured them in a few small ways by seeing to it that the right teacher was in the right place at the right time for the unsubtle Ned Stark to find. That the correct rooms just happened to be unused. Arya had been a small girl, and Cersei had been certain that she would like as not remain that way …Westerosi swordplay would never suit her frame, but Cersei had known exactly what would. 

 

She’d dreamed that perhaps Myrcella might show an interest in swordplay, that Cersei could give her daughter what she herself could not have…but Myrcella had been a gentle soul, the perfect daughter and she had never shown even a hint of the longing that had plagued Cersei all her life. 

 

So Cersei had quietly seen to it that Arya Stark would have the dancing lessons she wanted and if Cersei had now and again taken the opportunity to observe from behind a false wall and dream…what of it? She was the Queen and entitled to her small amusements.

The last day Cersei had watched the child practice, Ned Stark himself made an unexpected appearance, watching his daughter quietly from the corridor, just out of the child’s line of sight with a smile on his face that had made something inside Cersei’s heart twist painfully. It was pride, shining there in his gray eyes as he watched his youngest daughter doing what she loved. 

 

Cersei would have given anything for her father to have looked at her that way, even just once. Even on her wedding day Tywin had been unsatisfied with her performance. Nothing Cersei had ever done had been enough for him. 

Tywin Lannister was no Ned Stark, and it would have been over his dead body that his daughter be seen running about like a savage with a sword, getting knocked into the dirt by her weapons master, and if he had lived Tywin Lannister would have sold Cersei to the Tyrells like a swaybacked old mare if he thought it would preserve the family honor and silence the world’s whispers about her and Jaime.

Rolling onto her side to stare at the swath of moonlight coming from her window Cersei’s mind drifts naturally from Arya Stark and her Father to Brienne of Tarth. 

 

Lumbering beast the woman might have been, but there is a part of Cersei that envies the Tarth girl so bitterly that the strength of it nearly makes her skin crawl. Cersei’s feelings for the long-dead Arya Stark had been benign…but Cersei’s feelings towards Brienne of Tarth are far from it. Even if the other woman hadn’t been making calf’s eyes at Jaime every time Cersei looked at her, Cersei would have hated her.

 

It is obscene to Cersei that she, a Queen, the scion of an ancient and noble Great House should envy a horse-faced giantess from an insignificant backwater island - a woman who comes from a house so new that the ink of her family’s patent of nobility is barely dry. 

Cersei’s ancestors were ruling kingdoms while Brienne of Tarth’s were still scraping in the mud like the peasants they were. There should be nothing that the Maid of Tarth possessed that Cersei would want. Unfortunately, that was far from the case.

It simply wasn’t fair, but then again, when had anything about Cersei’s life ever been fair? The Maid of Tarth is taller than most men, with a face so rough and homely that it was all too easy to mistake her for a man until she spoke…that Cersei Lannister, queen of the Seven Kingdoms, first of her name, would envy her should have been laughable. 

It wasn’t, and that is a bitter draught for Cersei to swallow indeed, even in the privacy of her own mind.

 

Cersei had watched the other woman in secret during her time at the Red Keep, hidden by a screen in the gallery overlooking the training yard. It had been a passing fancy that moved Cersei to spy on the girl, at the time, morbid curiosity more than anything else, but the longer Cersei’d watched her, the less amusing the situation had become. 

Everywhere else Cersei saw her, Brienne of Tarth was a walking, talking, disaster. The larger woman was hopelessly clumsy, awkward and uncertain in both her manner and her speech, painfully shy and all too aware of her homely face and less than inspiring form. Cersei had not been impressed in the slightest.

In the training yard, however, it was as if the girl were suddenly another person entirely, because, with steel in hand, Brienne of Tarth danced, and to Cersei’s shock, abruptly there was nothing homely about her.

Brienne had handled her blade the way Cersei had always dreamed of doing, using the gleaming length of her sword as an extension of her body, gliding effortlessly from one form to another with a grace that made Cersei ache with envy. Cersei had, until that moment in the gallery entirely dismissed Jaime’s tales of the notorious Maid of Tarth as flattery and misplaced gratitude. 

Afterward, she could do no such thing, because far from gilding the lily, if anything, Jaime had damned the woman with faint praise. In hindsight, Cersei can’t help but suspect the reason why. Something inside Cersei tells her that it was in that single moment that she’d begun to really lose Jaime.

 

She and Jaime had been parted before by circumstance, but until the Tarth girl, Jaime had never sought out any woman’s company save Cersei’s, and Cersei had always known without question that she was the only person in her twin’s heart. 

No matter how much distance was between them, she’d been certain that Jaime belonged to her in every way that mattered. 

 

Looking back, Cersei knows that she should have killed the lumbering oaf of a woman when she’d had the chance. 

 

Perhaps if Cersei had, then Jaime would not have forsaken her, would not have gone off chasing his accursed *honor* and left Cersei and their child to be to face their enemies alone. Cersei isn't sure which infuriates her more: that Jaime has left her, or who he has left her for. 

 

For all that he’d claimed otherwise, Cersei knows that it is not honor that took Jaime north. It is sapphire-blue eyes and straw-gold hair, rough hands, and solemn sincerity. It is Brienne of Tarth that draws her brother like a lodestone, and Cersei hadn’t seen it until it was too late. 

Reluctantly, Cersei forces her thoughts away from their current path as she feels her temper rising. It is far more difficult than it should be. Cersei’s mind is growing dull with exhaustion and she knows it, she can feel it lagging and it frustrates her more than she’d like. 

 

Exhaustion is a handicap that Cersei knows all too well that she cannot afford. There is no time for her to be dull-witted now - not when she is alone and surrounded on all sides by enemies, both within and without. 

 

Betrayal lurks in the hearts and minds of the courtiers around her, treason whispering behind raised hands and elegant fans, Cersei can see it as clear as Myrish glass when her supposed supporters dare to meet her eyes. Cersei’s court may still bow and scrape as if nothing has changed but the moment the shadow of dragon wings had fallen over King’s Landing, Cersei knew she’d begun to lose her grip on the city and those within its walls. 

The people of King’s Landing may fear Cersei, but they also know her. They know what vexes her and what pleases her and at times they can predict her reactions and alter their own behavior accordingly… but they do not know Daenerys Targaryen, and legends had flown over their heads in the noonday sun, dragonsong filling the air above them once more after a hundred years of silence.

It’s not difficult to understand why when they look to the Dragon Queen they think they see the shape of the future and the end of Cersei’s own reign. Naturally, they look for ways to save themselves from the fires to come and the most infuriating part of the entire situation is that Cersei isn’t entirely certain they are wrong. 

 

She is under siege and she cannot afford to be anything but at her best. 

 

Cersei shuts her eyes and smooths her fingers over the growing dome of her abdomen idly, feeling the babe within move fitfully under her fingers. This child is all Cersei has now, and there is nothing she will not do to see them safe. 

 

Nothing at all. This child is more precious to Cersei than any kingdom, any wealth, any title. The babe currently in her womb is her hope, her one shining hope for the future. 

 

All those years ago, the witch had prophesied the death of three of Cersei’s children, she had predicted Robert’s infidelity and his legion of bastards, Cersei’s own queenship, and also her eventual fall and no matter how Cersei had tried to avoid it, it had all come true. One by one, she’d lost her little ones, and each of their deaths had taken a piece of Cersei’s soul with them. Three she’d lost, and gold were their crowns, gold their shrouds, just as the foul creature had promised Cersei that night in her dirty hovel. 

 

Yet all is not lost, because there is no curse on the child currently in Cersei’s belly, and that desperate hope is all Cersei has left to cling to. This child could live, if she can keep them both safe long enough to bring it into the world, but Cersei knows all too well that one mistake is all it will take to shatter that precious dream and the very thought of it terrifies Cersei.

Just as she’d told Ned Stark all those years ago in the garden, when one plays the game of thrones there is no middle ground. Cersei will win or she will die, and if she dies, her child will die with her. 

 

Cersei won’t allow that to happen. 

 

Not now or ever, not while she still has breath in her body. Cersei is resolved to fight to the bitter end, even if it means she must do so alone and friendless. She will make bargains with the Stranger himself if it will win her the war for Westeros.

 

Cersei will not fail this child as she failed Joffrey, as she failed gentle Tommen and her poor, innocent, Myrcella. 

This time will be different. She will make it so.

Cersei sighs in the dark, clenching her eyes in frustration before, at last, sitting up. In a sudden fit of temper, she grabs one of the pillows from her bed and hurls it at the wall with a frustrated snarl, but there’s no satisfaction in its muffled plop as it hits the floor.

 

Cersei abruptly and direly wishes she had a bottle to hand to follow it. Unfortunately, Cersei hasn’t touched wine since Qyburn confirmed her suspicion about her condition so there is no wine bottle at her bedside for her to throw and will not be for at the very least another year. 

Many women chose to imbibe while with child, seeing no harm in it but Cersei’d never drunk during any of her pregnancies, and since she intended to nurse this child at her own breast she had no intention of doing so afterward either. 

Robert had forbidden Cersei to nurse her children, all save Myrcella, at her own breast for fear of ‘sagging her teats’ and even now the memory of the fat pig saying so still made Cersei sneer. 

 

She’d fought him for Myrcella, though, and eventually, he’d given in. Myrcella had been her only daughter and so Robert had allowed Cersei to keep her closer than he had ever permitted her to keep Tommen or Joffrey. Instead of having a nursery Cersei had kept Myrcella in her own bed, waking in the night to feed her and stroke the perfect curves of her tiny face in the firelight, so full of tenderness that it had pained her.

 

Cersei had loved Myrcella so deeply that she thought she might drown in it, so wrapped up in her that she’d even barred Jaime from her bed for near on a year simply to focus on being the mother she wanted to be. The mother she’d wanted herself as a child. Cersei had vowed that she would give Myrcella what Tyrion had robbed from her if it was the last thing she ever did. 

Nothing had ever been more important to Cersei than her children but of the three….Myrcella had always been her favorite.

In years gone by, Cersei had taken a smug pride in knowing that, while other women were burdened by childbearing, drained of life as the child within them grew, she was entirely the opposite. Pregnancy had always filled Cersei with an almost manic sort of energy, buzzing like angry bees just beneath her skin.

Cersei’s restless hunger when she’d carried Joffrey had sent Robert even deeper into his cups than usual, and the memory of it still brings Cersei more pleasure than it probably should, Certainly, more than the man himself had ever provided her.

Cersei had always been a passionate woman, but as her belly grew, so too did the strength of her desires. She’d even lowered herself to attempt to seek out Robert’s attention once or twice when Jaime wasn’t available for one reason or another, but the moment her condition was visible, Robert had treated her like spun glass, afraid to touch her, much less take her to his bed for fear of harming the child in her belly. 

Robert also hadn’t been a man who appreciated forwardness in a woman at the best of times, either, and his discomfort with her aggression had unsettled him in a way that had only served to make the fire within Cersei burn all the hotter. Perhaps it was petty, but Cersei had long ago learned to take what joys she could in her marriage for they were few and far between.

Even Jaime had been hard-pressed to keep up with Cersei, in bed or out of it while she was with child, but Jaime is gone and so is Robert…Cersei is all that remains, Cersei and the child she carries.

The past is gone, but the future yet remains to be written and Cersei will see to it that that future is written in scarlet and gold because in the game of thrones, there is no middle ground and Cersei plays to win. 

 

Dawn is only just beginning to break when she hears the clarion call of the harbor horn ringing out to announce the arrival of the reinforcements from Essos…and in the steadily brightening light of her chamber Cersei’s smile is savage and hungry and suddenly her exhaustion vanishes as if it had never been. 

Euron Greyjoy and the Golden Company have arrived…and the future suddenly looks much brighter. 

At least for Cersei.


End file.
